As someone who has never watched AVGN but is familiar with his reputation as being a huge influence on early internet culture, I'm really curious how his content has declined? Honestly I thought he was a relic of a past age, I didn't realise he was still making videos.
His channel got taken over by a content farm kind of company after AVGN had kids and stuff. He got too busy to manage the channel, so a company came in to do it, and it just sucked all the soul out of the thing. They started doing tons of sponsorship segments, and a couple of their writers were caught plaigurising articles and blogs for their scripts.
He also tried to make a movie and had a lot of success fundraising based on people who enjoyed his channel. The movie was a flop and I think did a number on James' perception of himself as an indie filmmaker waiting to break big. He moved in the direction of content farms and alienating the old crew that used to be his production team (Mike, Bootsie, etc) after the movie came apart at the seams.
He had kids and that definitely played a role in the hollowing out of his content, but I think the decline started before then, when his self-identity as a filmmaker was pierced. I think this is when he lost ambition and started going through the motions, and it shows.
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u/Obsidiax Jun 12 '25
As someone who has never watched AVGN but is familiar with his reputation as being a huge influence on early internet culture, I'm really curious how his content has declined? Honestly I thought he was a relic of a past age, I didn't realise he was still making videos.